ABSTRACT
The grid computing paradigm based on resource sharing was brought to broader public by the popular project (https://setiathome.berkeley.edu) SETI@home. The goal of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) project is the detection of intelligent life outside earth. The project uses radio telescopes to listen for narrow-bandwidth radio signals from space. As such signals are not known to occur naturally, it is expected that a detection of them would provide evidence of extraterrestrial technology. The analysis of radio telescope signals involves huge amounts of data and is very computing intensive. No single research lab could provide the computing power needed for it. Given the tremendous number of household PCs, the involved scientists came up with the idea to invite owners of PCs to participate in the research by providing the computing power of their computers when they are idle. Users download a small program on their desktop. When the desktop is idle, the downloaded program would detect it and use the idle machine cycles. When the PC is connected back to the Internet, it would send the results back to the central site. The SETI initiative recently celebrated the 10th anniversary (it was launched on May 17, 1999) and has at present more than 3 million users that participate with their PCs.
